Prayer and the Will of God
Hubert van Zeller
SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS®
Manchester, New Hampshire
Prayer and the Will of God was formerly published in 1978 by Templegate Publishers, Springfield, Illinois, as a combined edition of Prayer in Other Words (Templegate, 1963) and The Will of God in Other Words (Templegate, 1964). This 2009 edition by Sophia Institute Press® includes minor editorial revisions.
Copyright © 2009 Sophia Institute Press®
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Van Zeller, Hubert, 1905-1984.
[Prayer in other words]
Prayer and the will of God / Hubert van Zeller.
p. cm.
Originally published: Springfield, Ill. : Templegate Publishers, 1978. With minor editorial revisions.
ISBN 978-1-933184-59-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Prayer — Catholic Church. 2. Christian life — Catholic authors. 3. God (Christianity) — Will. I. Van Zeller, Hubert, 1905-1984. Will of God in other words.
II. Title. III. Title: Will of God in other words.
BV210.3.V36 2009
248.3’2 — dc22
2009026102
09 10 11 12 13 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Other books by Hubert van Zeller from Sophia Institute Press®:
Holiness for Housewives
How to Find God
For Susan, Stephen, John, Paul, Mary:
the Andersons in other words
and
To Mary Vander Vennet in the hope that she may come upon it one day
Editor’s note: The biblical quotations in the following pages are taken from the Douay-Rheims edition of the Old and New Testaments. Where applicable, quotations have been cross-referenced with the differing names and enumeration in the Revised Standard Version, using the following symbol: (RSV =).
Part 1
Prayer
Chapter 1
Why We Must Pray
Why do people not pray enough? The answer is partly because they do not want to make the effort to begin, and partly because they do not know how to go on once they have begun. A lot of this difficulty would be cleared up if people would only understand that prayer comes from God, is kept going by God, and finds its way back to God by its own power. All we have to do is to lend ourselves to the process as generously as we can, and not put any obstacles in the way.
Our Lord is the light of the world, and by His light we are shown how to start and how to go on. The best way to think of it is to look upon our Lord’s prayer as an all-powerful dynamo that sends out spiritual strength day and night, unceasingly. From this dynamo our souls are charged, and when the batteries have gotten run down, we come again and again, every time we pray, to be recharged.
Without prayer we are in darkness, but in God’s light we see light.1
Our Lord has said that we have not chosen Him but that He has chosen us.2 It is the same in this matter of prayer. We are not so holy or so clever that we can make prayer. Prayer is a grace. Prayer is so spiritual that it has to be made by God. God brings our prayer out of us by pouring His prayer in. We are just the bellows: His is the breath of life. When our Lord speaks of the Spirit breathing and the Light shining, He is speaking of His life in us.
If we share our Lord’s life, we must also share His prayer. This is the wonderful thing about being a member of His Church — that we are part of His Body and part of the service He offers to the Father. He draws our service out of us by establishing Himself in our souls. We have the infinite merits of His life, death, and Resurrection to call upon at every moment of our lives. We cannot please God more than by calling upon them in the particular service of prayer.
Or you could put it this way. If you love someone very much, what is it that pleases you most about that person? You will surely answer, “Being loved back.” It is knowing that the other person feels as you do; it is seeing in another the same thing that is terribly important to you. Now, God is love. What He wants to see in you is the love He has put there. And He wants to see it expressed — He wants it to show. And that is why He wants you to pray.
Perhaps you think of prayer as wanting something from God when you pray. Up to a point, this is right: you want mercy, strength to resist temptation, answers to particular petitions, graces of one sort or another. But it would be more true to say that God wants something out of you when you pray. What He wants out of you is a generous response to the prayer of His own, which, as we have already seen, He has put there.
He who has created all things, who owns heaven and earth, wants something that you alone among all the millions of human beings who have been born into this world can give. He wants your own, particular, personal, direct, here-and-now service. Nobody else can give it instead of you: it is yours alone to be given to Him alone. Your service of prayer is seen by God as a single thing by itself. You can either give it or refuse it.
By giving it, you give the best that is in you — because it is His own love that you are returning to Him — and by refusing it, you waste the greatest chance that God can offer you. When you pray, you are using your human powers to their highest possible limit — in fact, you are using them beyond their highest possible limit because in prayer they are being carried along by grace — and when you have decided to give up prayer, you have thrown away the one really solid support that you can depend upon in this life.
God gets a truly spiritual prayer from the angels and saints in heaven. He gets a mixed sort of prayer from you and me. Our prayer is spiritual (or it would not be prayer at all), but it is also bound up with these fallen natures of ours, which we cannot escape. For as long as we live on this earth, we shall have to be content with a weighted prayer, a prayer that we can never quite handle as we would like, a gritty and earthy prayer that has to be constantly lifted up and sent on its way more directly toward God.
But however weighted down our prayer may be, it is at least a prayer. It is an effort, and has made a start. If we can honestly say we are trying, we can just as honestly say we are praying. So long as I am really trying to please God in my prayer (or in anything else, for that matter), I am pleasing Him. All He asks is that I should try to serve Him. The moment I try, I am in fact succeeding. I do not have to feel that I am doing it well, and that my prayer is pleasing God, because feelings are likely to be quite wrong about the goodness or badness of our prayers. All I have to be clear about is that I am making the effort.
Chapter 2
How We Should Pray
After reading what has been said so far, you may feel like someone who has been told how necessary swimming is and then has been thrown into the water without being told how to keep afloat. To know how important prayer is — and religiously, you cannot keep afloat without it — will not be much good to you unless you go on to the next step, which is to learn how to go about it.
Having taken in what is called the principle of prayer, we now have to think about the performance.
Now, whether the performance is an outward one, bringing you together with other people to pray in a church, or whether you are praying on your own, the worship you give must be yours. It is person-to-Person. Ev
en a ceremony in which everyone takes part (such as the Mass) is, underneath the printed words, a private conversation between you and God. What is called “liturgical” prayer is God’s revelation of Himself made public — a revelation that invites a personal as well as a public return from those who are joining in. As if nobody else were there, God is revealing something of Himself especially to you.
The fact that in public worship other people are there makes your response to God all the more pleasing to Him. He wants the members of His Body to be together in prayer and charity — all doing the same thing, but each in his own way. That is why there are churches and congregations. If He wanted a purely private devotion out of us, God would allow us to do all our praying at home. The truth is He wants both: He wants us to pray as part of a crowd because we are united to one another in the family of His Church, and He wants us to pray by ourselves because members of a family can often get closer to their Father when the others are not around.
You will notice that I have called prayer “God’s revelation of Himself,” which asks you to reveal yourself to Him in return. You may wonder at the word revelation, because when you are praying, you do not seem to notice anything of the kind. But a revelation does not always mean a blinding flash, the discovery of an important truth, the understanding of a mystery or a secret. Certainly it means something learned, something unveiled and imparted. When we pray, we come to know God better. We come to see by faith beyond the curtain that hides Him from us. Our knowledge, faith, and love are increased in the act of prayer. It does not happen suddenly, or even noticeably, but it does happen.
Say you were to stand in front of a painting, a masterpiece. If you were ready to take in what you saw, you would gain in knowledge. Your knowledge would make you like the picture. Your liking for the picture would make you understand a little about the artist who painted it. So, altogether you would be a lot better off, in regard to art, from having stood for a while in front of a masterpiece and gazed at it. The perfection of the work would have revealed itself to you.
Apply this to standing before God in prayer. Without having a vision or hearing a divine voice, without perhaps noticing at all what has been going on, you have been taking in something of God. Every time you pray, whether you are aware of the effect it is having upon you or not, you develop in the knowledge and love of God. God so imparts Himself to us in prayer, so “reveals” Himself, that we come away from it with the whole religious side of our natures enlarged and strengthened.
So what it all amounts to is that what God does for us in prayer is infinitely more important than what we do for Him in prayer. We cannot increase His knowledge and love of us in prayer — because He knows us through and through already, and loves with an eternal and infinite love — but He can increase our knowledge and love of Him. This is prayer’s particular grace: that we understand more, and therefore want to worship more. In his light we see light, and, seeing, are drawn to praise.
But to go back for a minute to the art gallery, it is obvious that you will not learn much about art, or come to have a liking for it, if you stand in front of the picture with your eyes shut. Or with your eyes open but with your mind closed. You have to look, you have to be ready to understand whatever the picture is supposed to mean. So also in prayer. You have to focus on God. You have to be ready to receive whatever He intends for you.
This is where the practical side of prayer begins — when you ask yourself, “How do I focus on God?... How do I get ready for what He intends? . . . How can I be sure of what He intends?” Always remembering that prayer is a matter of faith, and therefore a matter of operating more or less in the dark, we have at least certain lines to go upon which were given us by our Lord Himself. Fortunately, we are not left entirely to ourselves, and to see where our help lies, we must turn to the next chapter.
Chapter 3
Prayer in the Gospels
If we went through the four Gospels with a pencil, marking the places where prayer is mentioned, we would end up with a very long list. The list would be still longer if we included the times when, without mentioning prayer, our Lord speaks about love of His heavenly Father. Love is bound to break into prayer. The Gospels should teach us at least one absolutely clear truth about prayer — namely, that love inspires it, explains it, and crowns it.
Take the example of our Lord Himself. Strictly speaking, because He was united to His heavenly Father at every moment of His life, He had no need to pray. That is to say, He had no need to show His prayer. The fact that He was one with the Father was His prayer. But still He prayed outwardly and in a way that people could follow and understand. Why? Not only because love must burst out into praise, but because human beings had to be told about prayer and had to be shown how love works.
From the Gospels we learn how our Lord prayed in the early morning and late at night, how He prayed before working certain miracles, how He prayed over Jerusalem, how He prayed during the forty days of His fast in the desert, how He prayed when the most important times of His life were approaching, how He prayed for particular people (such as St. Peter, that his faith might not fail, and the Twelve, that they might always be one), how He prayed during the Agony in the Garden and finally during the last hours of His life. All this was praise to the Father but it was also an example to us. If our Lord, who is the head of the Body to which we belong, prayed so much and so often, then we, the members of that Body, must follow His lead.
The lessons to be learned, of course, are that morning and evening are the best times for prayer (because they are usually the quietest times, and it is easier for us to be alone); that we must pray for other people (especially for those who are weak and likely to fall away); that we must pray when we are tempted (and we are often particularly tempted when we are trying to do something really worthwhile for God); that we must pray extra hard before making an important decision or when faced with an important change in our lives (as our Lord prayed before choosing the Twelve, and when entering upon His Passion); and finally when we feel that the end of our life is near.
So nothing could be more practical than the application of our Lord’s example to our own individual needs. The Gospels are not written simply to present us with a story; they are for our instruction, for our help, for our advance in love and service and prayer. That is why the best material for prayer is a passage from one or another of the Gospels. Take any incident in our Lord’s life, or any paragraph out of our Lord’s preaching, and ask yourself how it affects you.
Remember that the Gospels are the word of God, and that He is speaking His word to you. The Holy Spirit does not have to shout at you to make the divine message clear to your soul; you do not have to wait until you hear miraculous voices before you start moving toward God. The inspiration is all there for you in the written word of God. Some bits of the Gospel will appeal to you more than others. God wants them to; He has arranged things like this. Well, make a point of looking out for passages that can become highlights of meaning for you especially. When you come upon a chapter, or even upon a verse or two, that sets something ringing in your soul, keep a firm hold on it, and do not let it go until you have discovered what it is trying to tell you. It has been written for you after all.
It is a tremendous help when you find yourself being addressed personally by the revealed word of God. Not only does it give you confidence, and the feeling that you have been singled out for the love of God, but it also puts you on the alert to find other passages of the same kind. Nothing helps prayer so much as the discovery that the words of God are alive — and alive for you. Whenever you get this sense of being at home in sacred scripture — and there is nothing silly or unreal about this feeling, because it is exactly the effect the scriptures are meant to have — be careful to follow it up.
The way to follow up such an impulse of grace is not to force your head into a course of biblical study. That might have a terribly cramping effect. No, all you have to do is to ask yourself three very simple qu
estions:
What does this bit of the story (or this point in our Lord’s teaching) tell me about God?
What does it tell me about myself?
What does it tell me of the will of God for me?
If you are absolutely honest about answering the second and third question, you will not only be learning a lot of the way of humility and obedience to the divine plan, but you will also be praying. You will be groping toward truth. When you have found out something of your real self, and have accepted the arrangements of God’s providence, you will be learning more and more about God Himself. All this will be a form of prayer. It may not be prayer as you see it set down in books, and it may not express itself much in words, but so long as it is a drawing near to truth and love and the infinite goodness of God, it will be prayer all right.
What else do we learn about prayer from the Gospels? Our Lord’s example starts us off, telling us that we have got to go ahead and pray. His sermons tell us how to go about it. He does not lay down many rules about prayer (nothing like so many as the books about prayer lay down), but the few He gives us are clear and simple and absolutely necessary. And they can be practiced by all — not only by the experts and saints.
The first thing is to realize that God has a father’s love for us and that we must go to Him in confidence and without fear — as affectionate children would go to an affectionate parent. Later in this book, we shall be going through the Our Father, and more will be said about the fatherhood of God. But even if our Lord had never given us the Our Father, He said enough about what our approach should be in prayer to convince us that the father-and-son relationship needed to be understood before anything else.
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